Love and Madness
by Dr. Abraxas
Summary: Jakotsu develops an unhealthy obsession with Inuyasha. But Jak's in the real world and Inu's in the anime. Can love conquer reality?


"Love and Madness" by Abraxas (04-10-20)

Renkotsu,

I must be calm for this won't be easy. Truth is, I don't know where to begin – I'm too shocked and numbed. But to answer your question, no, Jakotsu won't be going to the sanitarium; he won't be visiting doctors or anyone anywhere because he's dead. He's dead – he's dead – despite my intervention and in a manner that defies my power to describe succinctly.

If I simply told you how I found him it would do terrible justice to the mystery that surrounds the incident and haunts me. I feel as if I must explain it all – and I must, for the sad, awful truth is that you saw only a small fraction of his mania. You saw only his better, lucid days. Over the course of a year I've kept to myself things, seen and heard, out of fear my own sanity might be called into question.

Already I sound like a madman. I look like one, too, given the way Suikotsu eyed me up and down when he arrived with the ambulance this morning. Maybe he'll dismiss it – the stress of the ordeal, that sort of thing – and he'd be right, of course. Maybe. But even what I told him over the telephone wasn't the whole story.

You, Ren, are above all a learned man adept of reason. Forgive me. Delete this message and forget it. When the shock's gone and the world's resettled, I, too, will look upon this with a wrench of shame. But what I will not do – indeed, cannot do – is deny it.

It is! It is – I swear, it is!

Calm yourself, calm yourself...

From the first to the last...

It was about two years ago that Bankotsu died – and you know how hard Jakotsu took it. The long-haired Adonis was his first-everything so it was natural that he grieved over the untimely loss. A loss that was as sudden as it was baffling and to this day the crime remains unsolved – yes, crime, despite what the police reported it could not have been a suicide. Even though he was locked inside that basement room and there was no sign of forced entry or exit, even though he was known to be morbidly fascinated with exotic swords, what else could it have been but foul play? No one cuts off their own head.

By the gods, it was bad but it was worse that Jakotsu and I were boyfriends. I was jealous of Bankotsu – I don't have to tell you that – and my lover's reaction only heightened my envy especially after I learned how often he visited the cemetery. A few moments, a few minutes, then hours and hours. And even when he was home he'd just linger about that cellar until it all but transformed into a makeshift shrine.

Jakotsu's lowest point was that night when I returned home from school and couldn't find him. I searched throughout the house in and out but he wasn't there. And then it occurred to me that I knew exactly where to find him. Indeed, he was in the cemetery, sprawled over that dead-god's grave, so tight, so close it was as if he were trying to bury himself into the ground.

I brought him home, I cleaned and tended him. He was incoherent and for the next several days a sort of fever clouded his mind. Gradually he came out of it. Gently he initiated an intimacy that blossomed into the happiest days of our relationship.

We had been lovers before but now it was a different, deeper kind of love. Oh, how I long for those Romantic days when the earth was green and the skies were bright and blue. Even as I sit here, I'm haunted by his eyes that when they looked at me filled me with warmth I never felt before. His lips, when they kissed mine, his chin, when it nudged my shoulder fitted so snuggly one form into another that he seemed more like a dream, unreal and inscrutable, than a man of flesh and blood.

We all look up at the stars, Renkotsu, and sometimes we reach out to them, but something so beautiful just doesn't belong in this world.

The tranquility didn't come to an immediate end – no, no, it was a long, down slope of insanity that evolved almost imperceptibly from one eccentricity to the next. I can't say exactly when his mind snapped for good but I can say what triggered the process: it was the premier of Inuyasha on the Cartoon Network.

And this, my friend, is the tale you never knew, the horror I kept bottled up – prepare yourself, as I must, if you've reached this far into my message.

The anime, if you're unfamiliar with it, takes place both in modern and Feudal Japan. A teenage girl, Kagome, travels to and from the different eras through an old, magic well. Here and now she's a student taking one exam after the next; in the past she – and young, half-demon, Inuyasha – search the countryside collecting fragments of the Shikon Jewel. There's a lot more to it than that, of course – I skipped the evil bad-guys, the twisted love-triangles – but in a nutshell that's as much as I gathered from what was aired on the Cartoon Network.

Jakotsu watched the entire series – again and again – on bootleg DVDs in his native language. And even though we lived together for years I never picked up the language yet I needed no translation to know he fell in love with Inuyasha. Yes, I said fell in love and I meant it literally – not with the anime but with the character.

It was an obsession and it grew, firmer, deeper, finding all sorts of outlets to express itself. In the beginning he was eagerly candid about it, going so far as to show me the 'projects' he was working on: fan arts and fictions, though what it amounted to was little more than doodles, traces, a half-story and a few love-poems. At the end he became more and more anxiously secretive to the point where he kept so much to himself his creative work existed only in his precarious brain and there the plots and ideas took root and evolved.

It was a strange turn of events but 'Inuyasha' seemed to make him happy – and how could I take it away? I was resigned but I was confident, too, that his boyish capriciousness would cause him to lose interest and grow out of it. But he didn't grow out of it. Night after night he watched those DVDs into the dawn, falling asleep on the couch. Then, saying it was better than disturbing me with the sounds of the TV, he setup a viewing room in the cellar room – in Bankotsu's room – and soon enough he moved his clothes and items down below.

We stopped sleeping together and after a while our intimate moments were confined to a few hugs and kisses here and there. Every so often I was more than a bit flirtatious and he responded but just how seriously he thought about rekindling our relationship I do not know. There were times, once or twice a month, that he got strangely, almost spontaneously affectionate. And it was welcome but it was out of the ordinary: the way he'd say things under his breath, in Japanese when it used to be in English and the way he'd rub about the top of my head, as if he were feeling for dog ears.

One night I chased a spider out of the bedroom – a large, hairy spider with a leathery hide shiny like tanned human skin. I feared it was dangerous and I wanted to kill it but the damned creature was too fast. Curiously enough, though, instead of crawling into a corner or under a crack, it headed straight to the basement – it ran down the steps, past the tight, cramped passage and across the open doorway of that room, Jakotsu's room, where at last it fled from my sight to the shadows where I lost it forever amid the darkness.

Standing there, like a defeated idiot, I was suddenly very calm and silent. The TV was on and its glow cast a veil of dim light over the concrete floor. Japanese voices spoke telling me it was yet another Inuyasha episode...

I peered into the chamber – there, on the mattress on the floor, was Jakotsu, naked and writhing as he pleasured himself. I watched transfixed and unnoticed not only because I, too, was in the shadows but because his mind was so caught up in the fantasy to see me.

He climaxed and with a gasp fell exhausted.

I entered slowly, silently – it had been so long since I last touched him that I just didn't know how he'd react. On my knees I crept up by his bed. On my side I snuck down by his body. Without struggle or resistance we held each other – I kissing his cheek, my arm wrapping about his waist. I let my hand wander downward, downward until I contacted his spent flesh, warm and wet. I massaged him and in the throes of pleasure that surged through his body I felt his blood pulse and boil and mine run cold – I froze for I understood what was really happening for then and there, in a tone I heard only in the heat of our passion, he uttered the name Inuyasha.

On another occasion I passed by that room – the spider I chased into that void spun webs along the thin, narrow windows. I thought Jakotsu was asleep – he was sleeping during the day more and more as his habits changed in rather permanent ways since he discovered the anime of his dreams – so I was shocked to discover he was awake. I was shocked, too, by the impression the situation left _for there were two people within his room._

I was listening into a conversation spoken entirely in unfamiliar accents yet through which I discerned two, distinct voices: the first was Jakotsu's the second was not.

I looked into the chamber and I could have screamed at what I saw. Damn it, I should have told Suikotsu! I should have – I mean – I mean – I saw Jakotsu, sprawled over the mattress, speaking as he was staring, untrained and unfocused, into the recesses of that infernal room. He spoke and as he did so it was the most mischievous, most impish expression – and then he stopped and then he continued _in that other voice_ gruff and feral

Ren, even his face changed – it was a horrible, distorted grimace of something completely alien to his natural being.

Poor Jakotsu, he was channeling Inuyasha!

Be honest, if your eyes read this far, what do you think? He was crazy but who could I tell this to? How could I explain it? What could I do, I just didn't have the words.

Jakotsu lived in a parallel, dream-world that was sustained by his overactive imagination and nourished by the flow of fresh episodes.

And then, one fine day, I awoke and found him shaking and crying in the kitchen – the kitchen was one of the few places he ventured to. Haggard and almost-naked, I was shocked at the sight but acted at once to console him. As I stroked and brush aside his matted hair he confessed through tears the news he heard from Japan: that the anime was cancelled.

I felt sorry – and guilty. Already my mind was scheming, my friend: what was bad news for him was good news for me and ultimately good news for him, too. The silver-lining of that pent-up storm cloud was no more and no less than the way out of that insanity. Surely, certainly, now that whole 'Inuyasha' phase was destined to pass. Still, I wanted to be helpful so I didn't push the issue fearing the wound was too raw, too early.

I coaxed him into the bedroom and together we spent the rest of that day talking. Well, to be honest, I talked more than he. I updated him to the events, locally, globally, that passed all the while he was mentally 'exiled.' For his own part he was responsive but passive and no matter how many times I asked he did not reveal just what he was doing in the basement.

Unfortunately, that window of sanity I prayed would be permanent was short-lived. And as it became more and more evident there wouldn't be more episodes of Inuyasha, he fell into denial. What was left of the love and yearning for the world beyond the cellar room – Bankotsu's coffin, as it were – was extinguished.

It was the deepest depression – and the onus is mine. Yes, it's mine, Ren. Could it have developed so far without my protecting him? It was I who kept the vast majority of his madness out of the public light. To keep his friends from discovering what became of him, I invented excuses: that he was physically ill, that he was recovering from something, that he was too weak, too sleepy, that he was this, that he was that. For the most part I got away with it – even after Suikotsu volunteered to nurse him I got out of that hard-spot. I don't know how, but I did. I felt like that grandfather always making excuses for Kagome – but at least she was going through a well into another time.

The long-winded conversations he kept having and I kept listening. Discarded, crumpled notes of failed writings scattered across the floor. Life-sized, colored sketches of Inuyasha drawn all over the walls. Jakotsu's obsession with a fictional, animated character was limitless and when I say that I think, I know, despite the forcefulness of my words I simply understate the fact.

One night – no – one day. Yes, it was last night. Jakotsu was crying. But it was a habit of his, Ren, spontaneously crying or laughing depending on what circumstance he imagined. I entered the chamber and lay beside him at the edge of the mattress. Amid the darkness I could see out of the corner of my eye the slender legs of that spider waving about the shadows as if mocking me but I didn't care anymore if it lived or died.

"You know," I said, kissing his cheek, "I miss you."

He smiled and snuggled tightly next to me – rubbing my arm up and down he turned his face to mine and kissed my lips.

I hugged him tighter and tighter still, nearly in tears myself, I could have melted.

He spoke words of pity because no matter what I would never find a demon like Inuyasha – and then openly speculated about the softness of his ears, the tone of his chest.

I reminded him that Inuyasha wasn't real but that his friends and I were and that we loved him very much. All the while I rubbed the back of his head, feeling for that hairpin I bought him many years ago. I found it – that blue hairpin decorated with butterflies – it was still there and its very presence reassured me...

"You don't understand," he said in a slow voice in near-perfect English. "_He is real._"

And with that he arose and led me through an impromptu tour of the viewing room. He showed me things – things, he said, he brought back from the other side. Part of a uniform: a pale-yellow yukata. Part of a weapon: a sheath of purple velvet that could have held a massive sword. Artifacts: yellow scrolls, magic spells and a supposed shard of the Shikon Jewel.

Standing there, looking at the reddish fragment of what could have been tinted glass, I was taken aback at the lengths he went through to convince himself – to convince me? – of the reality of that parallel world.

I spotted scraps of cloth sprinkled with red and black spots.

"Those are bandages Sango prepared for me."

"Bandages? Why bandages?"

He explained they were for injuries suffered while on the hunt for jewel fragments.

He bore his chest and I gasped – wounds that I never saw before scarred his back, his sides even his stomach.

"Oh, god, Jakotsu!"

I clasped him in my arms, rocking him gently back and forth – why didn't I notice? Why didn't I stop it? But what else were they but self-inflicted?

His was a mind at the end of its tether for it wasn't enough that Inuyasha existed in imagination, he wanted the demon to live in fact – and as he looked at me, convinced of his surety and I of his insanity, he confessed that sometimes he brought back through dreams more than just inanimate objects.

He produced a picture taken with a digital camera. He explained Inuyasha wasn't keen on picture-taking so he snuck a shot. It was indeed a picture taken from within the room: I saw the door, the TV illuminating the scene but I didn't see anything in the image to support his statements. Until he pointed to the bottom left corner upon which my thumb rested. Removing my finger, I revealed it: a fragment of red cloth draped across the ground he claimed was the excess cuff of the half-demon's haori jacket.

I returned the picture and with another hug, another kiss, I bid Jakotsu goodnight. I left the room, questioning and agonizing, wondering if I ought to have challenged his claim. But I just didn't have the heart to argue – even though, hanging out in the open closet, was a red Cosplay costume of Inuyasha's outfit he bought on-line in his earlier, saner days.

I said Jakotsu's sleeping habits changed but only at the end did it become an extreme. Indeed, throughout that last week of his life he spent at most one or two hours a day awake. And as he grew more and more detached he got paler and weaker. But it was when he failed to meet me in the kitchen for dinner – really, at that point it was the only time we interacted – I knew I couldn't hold back any longer.

Resolute and calm, I walked into the basement and stood before the door – the damn, detestable spider spun its silky threads across the frame as if to seal the chamber with its webbing. Without knocking or alerting, I entered the chamber and there I found Jakotsu lying naked atop the mattress. I was shocked by his appearance: scarred, beaten and unnaturally thin. His hands covered his genitals and the area between his legs glistened with a kind of dry dew.

Sitting at the edge of the bed I sighed, shaking my head and wondering what to do next. I would call for help – but I would need evidence or else I would not be believed right away. So I searched the closets – but, evidently, while I had been away at school he had been busy 'cleaning': the items I saw earlier were gone, even the shard of the Shikon, that he took to wearing pendant about his neck, was not to be found.

Instead I discovered the last, secret facet of his depravity: at the back of a dresser drawer were bottles of sleeping pills, empty and discarded except for one. The prescription was a remedy Suikotsu prescribed once – now I took it as evidence. Along with journals in which he wrote the fantasies and dreams of that parallel life with Inuyasha – curiously, the papers were written in English.

Maybe. Maybe, Ren, maybe _he wanted me to find it_.

I cursed: it was a cry for help heard too late.

I kissed Jakotsu and with strips of cut-up linen I secured him to the bed – I just couldn't risk him awakening and causing even more damage to himself.

As soon as I left I called Suikotsu. I told him that Jakotsu was mentally unstable. That he was in the midst of a deep depression. That he was cutting himself and taking sleeping pills. I tried to sound sane and rational so I didn't tell him the full story – how could I over the phone?

He agreed to arrive that morning and take Jakotsu to the sanitarium for observation – I hung up and sighed, relived for it seemed he would be better again, after all, after all of that.

After that, right after that, I noticed how absolutely quiet the house became. But it wasn't the sort of quiet that comes from being alone; it was the kind of eerie calm before the storm. A deep-seeded sense of terror befell me – it's impossible to describe it, Ren, it's just that at that moment I knew what it was like for the zebras to feel the eyes of lions upon them for at that moment I felt the presence of something other-worldly staring at me from beyond oblivion.

I passed by the door that led to the basement. I paused, I looked – down the yawning abyss, what was once unassuming and familiar was now infused with an air of dread and foreboding heretofore unknown to me. My imagination became aware of operations, subtle and indistinct, at work within that void and suddenly, it seemed, anything was possible.

What was going on in there?

With the lights off, I tiptoed down the stairs. It was so utterly serene if a spider crawled by my foot I could have heard it. I reached the chamber door – that I locked with a long screwdriver – and stood. And listened.

What was going on in there, in the room, in Jakotsu's mind?

Ren, was it possible that Jakotsu was so determined to make Inuyasha real that even my own mind was willed into believe it?

No – I ran out of there at the mere suggestion of it and closed myself off in the bedroom.

Yes, in my own way I was loosing it.

Crawling into bed, I started to put the pieces together, not of Jakotsu's mania but of my reaction to it. The guilt, the guilt of not acting sooner, was I, too, in denial? Did I force myself to look away because to confront the truth would have meant to admit something so ridiculous it would have exposed my sanity as surely as it exposed his? For it then seemed clear: he was in love with Inuyasha and I was jealous of that silver-haired demon.

And now I was about to take Inuyasha away just like I took Bankotsu away that night I found him lying over that grave – by the gods, it was as if I became Naraku...

I didn't sleep well that night. I don't recall any dreams, only a few incoherent, disconnected images and sounds, inhuman and bestial. I awoke with a start, almost relieved the ordeal was over – until I heard those exact same noises rumbling from within the house.

Screaming, I bolted from the bed to the door – that was wide open – and turned the lights on. The room had been broken into and one area had been thoroughly ransacked. It was the nightstand where I placed the notebooks and sleeping pills.

I combed through the spilled and scattered contents – "Jakotsu!" I shouted.

Something deep within the house fell and broke – and the sound of it, sudden, violent, paralyzed me.

I turned around, I wanted to run but at best I staggered – one painful, aching step at a time I freed myself of the apoplexy of the horror that was then dawning upon me.

Fool! He must have overheard me talking over the phone. He must have broken himself free of the restraints and came up to the bedroom to get the pills!

Out in the hallways, I gasped for breath – my very hair stood on end.

"I love you, Jakotsu!" I shouted. "Please! Please, don't go away!"

I crawled toward the open doorway leading to the basement stairs – there I poked my head into the blackness.

"Jakotsu!" I cried aloud at the dreadful sights of formless shadows revealed by the weak moonlight shining through the wide, slit windows.

I clamored down the steps and against every fiber of my being telling me not to do it, I turned on the lights.

I screamed, again, but it wasn't a scene of unspeakable monstrosity – calm yourself! – it was a horror far too subtle, too delicate and I was caught in the middle of it like a fly on a spider web. Only something so simple, something so ordinary could have been so terrifying – not so much for what it was but for what it meant. Lying on the floor was the long screwdriver – it had been sliced in half, cleanly in half and along the wooden door frame it once jammed were wide, deep scratches.

I pulled aside the door, I bolted into the room.

Oh, Renkotsu, why did I do it? Why did I enter? Why? It's destroyed my mind but don't think I'm mad, my friend, don't think I'm mad, no matter what Suikotsu tells you. He doesn't know because he wasn't there. He didn't see what I saw. But know, as truly as you breathe, that this is what I found: Jakotsu was still in the bed, strapped to the mattress exactly as I left him. He had not moved – and would never move again – and nothing else changed, nothing, except for the emptied pill bottle next to his head and the strands of silver hair across his lips.

END


End file.
